Comic Strips

I'm so sorry that your daughters were denied justice, and that other women in your life suffered similarly. I'm unlucky enough to say that I'm not unfamiliar with being in that position. I understand. Sometimes the injustice and cruelty of it takes your breath away.

I don't know if you have heard of this but there's a book that I use as a guide in my life that I often ask people to read when they feel that they're being asked too much. It is called 'The boy who was raised as a dog' written by two child psychiatrists.

Thank you for considering my words kindly. I definitely agree that humanism and feminism are not the same. Neither humanism or feminism are perfect, which is why we need scholarship, discussion and lived experience. Most people sadly try to reach not even one.

They fulfill different purposes. Lived experiences and the day to day fight for justice is different from judicial or feminist scholarship and is no less valid. At the same time frameworks for fighting for individual justice and equity are different from those for the same at the systemic level.

It is also truly connected to the no true Scotsman fallacy as you pointed out. I arrived at humanist umbrella because it encompasses a broader set of intersectionalities that aren't necessarily the focus of feminist movement or scholarship until recently such as race (which has changed a lot), language, disabilities, neurodivergence, colonialism, religious oppression and other things that are personal to my experience.

I also arrived at it because I found that the feminist social movement, in parts, as a way to maintain cohesion and structure framed the struggle partly as a conflict with an out group and individual moral failing, often implicitly, which is antithesis to the decidedly non-western moral ethos that I come from. This is not necessarily reflected in the scholarship or formal frameworks. The sad reality is that people took labels and analysis that were supposed to be descriptive and started using them in a prescriptive fashion, which caught on, and as you said very few people cared to look at the original sources.

The lack of categorisation and acknowledgement of universal worthiness is what attracted me towards humanism. To me it is valuable because there is no humanist tribe.

It all circles back to the Scotsman, is fighting for justice and equity for women feminism if you don't necessarily believe in parts of feminist scholarship and organizations? Whether it comes from the drive to ease the suffering of women around you or from the humanist idea that all beings are of equal worth and deserving of having their suffering eased?